The 2nd Annual Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC) in our New York office on August 23 and 24, 2007.

Adam Porter & Atif Memon - Skoll DCQASSoftware engineers increasingly emphasize agility and flexibility in their designs and development approaches. They increasingly use distributed development teams, rely on component assembly and deployment rather than green field code writing, rapidly evolve the system through incremental development and frequent updating, and use flexible product designs supporting extensive end-user customization. While agility and flexibility have many benefits, they also create an enormous number of potential system configurations built from rapidly changing component implementations. Since today's quality assurance (QA) techniques do not scale to handle highly configurable systems, we are developing and validating novel software QA processes and tools that leverage the extensive computing resources of user and developer communities in a distributed, continuous manner to significantly improve software quality.

Adam PorterAdam A. Porter is a professor with the Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland and is the Associate Director of the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. He is a winner of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence in the College of Computer, Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Maryland. He is currently a member of the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and served previously on the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. He is a senior member of both the IEEE and ACM. His current research interests include empirical methods for identifying and eliminating bottlenecks in industrial development processes, experimental evaluation of fundamental software engineering hypotheses, and development of tools that demonstrably improve the software development process.

Atif MemonAtif M. Memon is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland. He received his BS, MS, and Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1991, 1995, and 2001 respectively. He was awarded a Gold Medal in BS. He was awarded Fellowships from the Andrew Mellon Foundation for his Ph.D. research. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2005. His research interests include program testing, software engineering, artificial intelligence, plan generation, reverse engineering, and program structures. He is the inventor of the GUITAR model-based testing software. He serves on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Software Testing, Verification and Reliability (STVR), the Open Software Engineering Journal (OSE), and the Canadian Journal of Pure and Applied Sciences (CJPAS).